A Brighton native and resident for seventy-eight years, Persis Cook died Tuesday, October 4, 1983, in Clearwater, Florida, where she had been living since retiring from her second teaching career in 1968.  She was 93 years old.

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John Sutherland’s grandparents, Col. Castle and Nancy Ann, were both born in New York in the last decade of the 18th Century.  His father, Solomon, was the youngest of 11 children.  By 1828 Castle and Nancy Ann were in Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor and Scio, where Solomon was born, 1833.  By 1834 Castle owned […]

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It was 1841 when George E. Pless’ grandfather, Henry Andrew (Frederich Heinrich Andreas) Pless purchased 240 semi improved (somewhat cleared) acres on the Grand River Indian Trail, west of Brighton in Genoa Township.  (Section 11, SW NW ¼, north of Hughes Rd.; sec. 12, E ½ SW ¼, Euler Rd.; Sect. 13, W ½ NW […]

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By the mid 1850s many of the settlers coming to the area had immigrated from Germany.  Among these were carpenter/farmer Henry Becker, born 1831 and his wife Margaret and John, a farmer, born 1834.  It will be assumed they are brothers since they have the same town of origin, Willofs and came to the United […]

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Archibald Hollister, born in Connecticut, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.  A son, Algernon Sydney (A.S. as he was popularly referred to), was born January 28, 1796, in Vermont.  Anna Teall, born in Vermont in 1800, married A.S., an Episcopal minister. 

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1787 saw the enactment of legislation by the new U. S. government, which formed the Northwest Territory.  (States of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.) By 1805 the Territory of Michigan was separated from the Northwest Territory as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had been at earlier dates.  When General Lewis Cass became governor of the Michigan […]

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Of the seven children of Godfrey and Sophia Westphall, Gustav was the youngest and the only one born in the U.S. His next oldest brother, Lewis H. (b. 1845), was born on the Atlantic Ocean during the long crossing from their ancestral home in Germany.

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Groups of settlers united as they headed west to Michigan from New York in the 1830s; many of them long time friends.  (Not unlike the wagon trains which ‘went West’ a few years later.) Arriving in Brighton Township they found no living quarters, merely a wilderness.  Some land was level, some wet, much rolling, almost […]

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As early as 1837, German Lutherans had settled in southeastern Livingston County.  By 1842, they began meeting for public worship services, under the leadership of the pioneer Lutheran missionary in eastern Michigan, the Rev. Frederick Schmidt (born Sept. 6, 1807, in Wuertemberg, Germany; died August 30, 1883 at Ann Arbor). 

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Eldad Spencer Field, with brother-in-law Norton Wait, came to Michigan within ten years of the completion of the Erie Canal. (The convenient and economical route over the Appalachian Mountains in New York opened the way for settlers to pioneer in Michigan Territory. Early Livingston County census records indicate a family of Fields in each township.)

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